There are 124 Territories on this map.12 Constellations which are each a continent as well as a part of a group of 2 other continents. Explanation: Each Constellation is Part of a season (Summer, Fall, Winter, Spring) and part of an Element (Fire, Water, Earth, Air) as well as a continent by itself.

The one Territory that does not fall into any continent is the Black hole in the center which offers 2 access points to half of the constellations, and access at one point to an additional constellation. This territ will reset to 3 Neutral at the beginning of the holders turn, also it decays all connected territs by 1 at the beginning of each turn (only affects the player who holds the connected territ on their turn). This territory will start neutral with 6 Units on it.

Each player will start with an equal number of random territories. Any undesignated territories will be neutral with 2-5 units (at random).

The equation for the bonuses of the larger grouped continents that I used is: Bonus = NumTerrits/3 (rounded to the nearest whole number) - However with the implementation of individual constellation bonuses, I am considering dividing the current equation by 2, so that when someone owns a grouping continent, they won’t have an overly outrageous bonus (even though holding the grouped continents will be extremely difficult)For the individual constellations I created a line plot (below) and divided it into 6 sections and every constellation that fell within the certain number of territs was assigned a bonus from 3 to 8.

Last edited by rsacheli on Sat Apr 23, 2011 8:35 pm, edited 58 times in total.

i just want know what ppl think of the concept... is it a playable idea? would ppl play it? i need this input before i put too much more effort into making it look good... im not going to waste my time if its not going to go anywhere...

are you sure of libra's wrongness? libra is supposed to be between scorpio and virgo according to the star maps i referenced...

Last edited by rsacheli on Tue Aug 12, 2008 4:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.

or perhaps adding actual pictures surrounding the starts that would be broken up in to the territs holding the stars... then it wouldnt be as linear...

i just wanted to put this out here with the accurate stars and put it down (outside of my head)

i agree that currently it looks like crap... but thats what this is for... criticism to make it better... so saying it looks like crap but offering no advice is kinda pointless... (yes i admit i did say someone elses idea was dumb w/o offering any suggestions... so perhaps i dont deserve anything more than that...)

i like this idea considerably more than azn. as it is, it of course looks silly and unplayable but it's an interesting idea and i think this has potential to go places if you stick with it. let me know if you need any advice or assistance

First, I was thinking of only the constellations around the EARTH (I'll remind you the Sun goes through all these constellations). However, there are too many stars to make all of them territories. A way to attack adjacent stars and 4 warp zones (at equinox and solstice for instance).Then, for the bonus, a whole season seems more reasonable because there is great difference in the number of stars between neighbouring constellations. In addition to this rule (which makes only 4 continents). We could have 4 other continents based on the element of the zodiacal sign. For instance: Fire = Ares + Lion + Sagittarius. This makes all in all 8 continents which can be crossed.Finally, I thought of a more astrological map, not a scientifical one. It would be more beautiful and pleasant to play.

one thing i'd like to note is, that while we want to stay as scientifically accurate as possible with this map, it's not a huge deal if we fudge with it a little (ex: if we wanna put ursa major next to scorpio or something like that... well, it's not atrologically correct but who cares all that much really) what's more important is gameplay and making this fun to play, not total accuracy. if we have to rearrange the skies a bit here, so be it

this is a zodiac map not a night sky... I thought about the night sky idea and it would be to large... And does it really matter if it's the sun or the earth in the middle? I'm prolly just gonna make it a black hole so all the concerns on what is correct can just stop... If I wanted it to be completely correct I wouldn't have made it circular for one... Look at my draft... That is my idea I started with and the end product will be similar to that... I'm not adding any other constellations cause then it wouldn't be a zodiac map like I stated before

u know, when i read ur first post, an image of teh night sky, plus all the constellations came to mind. now that would be a great looking map to play on. the current one is like a bad cross between 8 thoughts/crossword/chinese checkers. sorry but thats how it seems to me.

try to give what i said some thought. the current one is way too big even for a large map but if u try my way, u could fit all nicely and have each star a territory and the constellation it self a continent. then just use path ways to connect all the constellations together but u might have to use different line types or colours to differentiate between pathways within a star (perhaps white glowy lines) and something else to connect the constellations themselves.

I think the sun is actually a good idea, since the 12 signs are based on the solar zodiac. Sun is the classical "planet" that has the most connection with the zodiac. By the way, another suggestion of what you could put around the Sun are the other 6 classical "planets" - Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.

But otherwise, and focusing on gameplay/concept, the map presented honestly doesn't look so good to me because there are too many "dead-ends" / easily isolated areas. For example, look at Scorpio. You can protect a 21-territory area by holding just 1territory, and that sounds ridiculous to me. No, scratch that - I hadn't noticed that ALL zodiac signs are connected to the rest of the map by 1 territory each. That's egregious. I don't mean to discourage you, I think the idea has lots of potential (if there's someone who's pretty good with graphics willing to work on it, it could well be one of my favorite maps) as long as the layout is more balanced.

Maybe lay out the constellations so that they "fit" each other a bit more neatly (sorta jigsaw-like), and make it so that each constellation has about 2-5 connections to the rest of the map - both to the two constellations in either side along the zodiac, and to the planets in the center of the circle. I don't know, maybe you could use other elements to connect them as well, such as the aforementioned seasons, or even the four classical elements (since there are three signs associated to each element, maybe there could be shortcuts between them). Just throwing ideas around and hoping to help, since I think this could be a great map if gameplay and graphics are well-designed.